When one proceeds to look more closely at the particular test to which it was God's pleasure to subject His servant, it offers at once difficulties of a very grave description. That a good man should be told to imbrue his hands in the blood of his own guiltless boy, and should be expected to believe that a horror like that could be God's will, or a service of worship agreeable to the Supreme-this certainly appears at first sight no less incredible than it is revolting. How could it consist with the Divine character to demand such a barbarity? How was it possible for the devout mind of Abraham to consent to it? It is in vain that some have sought an escape from these questions by conjecturing that the patriarch may have misconceived the manner in which his offering of Isaac was intended to be carried out. The Divine command is couched in terms too precise for that, unless we are to permit ourselves serious liberties with the narrative. Unquestionably, the sacred narrator understood that what Abraham endeavoured to do was the very thing God's voice had bidden.
The answer commonly given runs thus: “Abraham was in danger of loving Isaac more than God. He was unconsciously idolizing the darling of his old age. To show him his sin, and to recover him from it, to make his faith perfect, and to demonstrate that it was perfect, God tempted him; God placed him in a dilemma in which he was compelled to choose between Isaac and Jehovah, to sacrifice his profoundest human affection to his love for God, to show that he valued the unseen and spiritual above all that was fairest and dearest in the world of sense and time.” This, as it is one of the most reasonable interpretations of the story, so it has been very generally welcomed by candid and thoughtful students of the Word. Yet, when we consider it, can we be content with it? Does it vindicate the course Abraham took? If he was in danger of loving Isaac more than God, must he, to save himself from that sin, be guilty of a still greater sin? Could it be right that, to save himself from guilt, he should kill his innocent son, and so incur a heavier guilt? Are we to condone murder on the plea that it redeems a man from idolatry, or that it strengthens his faith in spiritual realities? When the question is put thus, we feel that if Abraham attempted to kill Isaac, lest he should love him overmuch, he simply tried to cast out devils by the prince of the devils. To avoid that conclusion many plead, “But God told Abraham to offer up his son; he did not do it of his own accord: it was a Divine, not a human, expedient!” To that plea we reply, “You are simply transferring the guilt from Abraham to God. Wrong things do not become right because God tells us to do them, or, rather, because we think He does. Right and wrong are not mere caprices that change and vary at His will. Whoever ordered it, we know that for a father to kill his blameless son must be wrong and not right; that for a sinful man to commit murder in order to save his soul, is simply to damn his soul well-nigh beyond all hope of redemption.”
1. In order to understand God's part in this incident, and to remove the suspicion that God imposed upon Abraham as a duty what was really a crime, or that He was playing with the most sacred feelings of His servant, there are one or two facts which must not be left out of consideration. In the first place, Abraham did not think it wrong to sacrifice his son. His own conscience did not clash with God's command. On the contrary, it was through his own conscience that God's will impressed itself upon him. No man of Abraham's character and intelligence could suppose that any word of God could make that right which was in itself wrong, or would allow the voice of conscience to be drowned by some mysterious voice from without. If Abraham had supposed that in all circumstances it was a crime to take his son's life, he could not have listened to any voice that bade him commit this crime. The man who in our day should put his child to death and plead that he had a Divine warrant for it would either be hanged or confined as insane. No miracle would be accepted as a guarantee for the Divine dictation of such an act. No voice from heaven would be listened to for a moment, if it contradicted the voice of the universal conscience of mankind. But in Abraham's day the universal conscience had only approbation to express for such a deed as this; not only had the father absolute power over the son, so that he might do with him what he pleased; but this particular mode of disposing of a son would be considered singular only as being beyond the reach of ordinary virtue. Abraham was familiar with the idea that the most exalted form of religious worship was the sacrifice of the firstborn. He felt, in common with godly men in every age, that to offer to God cheap sacrifices, while we retain for ourselves what is truly precious, is a kind of worship that betrays our low estimate of God rather than expresses true devotion. He may have been conscious that in losing Ishmael he had felt resentment against God for depriving him of so loved a possession; he may have seen Canaanite fathers offering their children to gods he knew to be utterly unworthy of any sacrifice; and this may have rankled in his mind until he felt shut up to offer his all to God in the person of his son, his only son, Isaac. At all events, however it became his conviction that God desired him to offer his son, this was a sacrifice which was in no respect forbidden by his own conscience.
No one can ever persuade himself that wrong can be right. He may wish to do wrong, and please himself by pretending he has convinced himself, but all in vain. He knows at the back of his mind-and especially when he wakes at 3 a.m.-that wrong is wrong and not right.1 [Note: Joseph Bell: An Appreciation (1913), 47.]
2. When we ask why this command did not outrage Abraham's conscience, the answer is twofold.
(1) There was a low estimate held then of the individual life.-In Abraham's time, and in the early history of all nations, Individualism was unknown, and a form of Socialism prevailed. “Primitive Society,” as Sir Henry Maine has said, “has for its units not individuals, but groups of men united by the reality or the fiction of blood relationship.” “Ancient law,” he says again, “knows next to nothing of individuals. It is concerned not with individuals, but with families, not with single human beings, but groups.” Again, and largely as the result of this, we must observe that, in those early days, “the eldest male parent is absolutely supreme in his household. His dominion extends to life and death, and is as unqualified over his children and their houses as over his slaves; indeed”-according to Sir Henry Maine-“the relations of sonship and serfdom appear to differ in little beyond the higher capacity which the child in blood possesses of becoming one day the head of a family himself. The flocks and herds of the children are the flocks and herds of the parent”; and further, the parent held all this property not as we hold it, as a matter of personal right, but “in a representative rather than in a proprietary character.” It was what might be called tribal Socialism. It denied the right not only to private ownership in land and other material wealth, but also to private ownership of a man's own limbs and life. Our modern idea of a man as having a separate right to his own property and to his own life did not exist. As an act of justice in those days, a man's whole family was sometimes put to death with him as the punishment of his crime. A man's children were a man's property-not less dear for that; but the relationship was something so different from the relationship that exists among us that we can hardly understand it.
In modern times a man's life belongs to himself; to put him to death as a sacrifice is to give up that which is not ours to give. It was not so in primitive society; a man's life belonged to his tribe, and could be disposed of by the head of his tribe. To Abraham, Isaac is a treasure of his own which he has to give up, a treasure which is dearer to him than any other earthly thing, and which it is the greatest trial of his life to part with, but which is still his own, belonging to him, and appropriate to him to surrender. To Abraham therefore the command to sacrifice his son would have a moral character altogether different from that which a similar command would have to us. This has to be remembered throughout the story.1 [Note: R. W. Dale.]
(2) Secondly, we can imagine that, as Abraham passed from one end of the promised land to another, he would sometimes actually witness the human sacrifices which the heathen people who then held the country offered occasionally to their gods, and he might still more frequently hear of them. The question would occur to him whether he was capable of similar devotion to the Eternal. Was his reverence for the supreme God as deep, would it prove in time of trial as effective, as their reverence for their inferior divinities? He broods over the question. Isaac is dearer to him than all the world besides. And further, it is through Isaac that all his visions of future greatness and glory for his descendants are to be fulfilled. Nor was this all: through Isaac he and his descendants are to be channels of Divine blessing to all nations. Could he, at the command of the Eternal, sacrifice Isaac as the heathen were sacrificing their own sons? Perhaps he doubts. How could he sacrifice the son that he loves with so immense a love? How could he destroy, with his own hands, his great hope, the hope of the human race, the hope which had come to him through the wonderful goodness of God? Everything else that he had he would sacrifice at the command of God;-but this! was it not too much? It would be, no doubt, the final, the supreme proof of his faith in God and his obedience to Him; but was it possible? Then came the Divine voice. If to sacrifice Isaac seemed to Abraham the final, the supreme proof of his fidelity to God, he must do it. Abraham's own conscience declared that this would be the highest proof of his faith and obedience. It may be-it was, in this instance-an unenlightened conscience. But what he feels would be the highest proof of his faithfulness to God, this the voice of God requires from him.
The memory that, in the matter of child sacrifice, the Hebrews once stood on a level with the other Semites and Canaanites distinctly shines through the narrative. But it is equally clear that a higher faith must long have been common property in the Israelitish community, before it could reflect itself in such a story in the legends regarding Abraham. Human sacrifice, and especially child sacrifice, was widely spread among the Canaanites, Phœnicians, Carthaginians, and Egyptians, and among the Moabites and Ammonites, who were akin to Israel and by these sacrifices honoured Moloch; it was also practised among Aramean and Arabian peoples. The legal enactments against the practice show that the Israelites of even post-Mosaic times had not entirely shaken off such practices. Child sacrifice continually threatened to re-establish itself, being aided in especial by the recognized sanctity attaching to a firstborn; and it again gained wider currency from the time of Ahaz. It was, without doubt, of the highest importance in the struggle with this error which it was so difficult to eradicate, that the writers of the earliest history of Israel clearly taught in Abraham's life, and by his example, in what sense it is that God desires the sacrifice even of one's dearest child, and in what sense He does not; and also that they proved that the full truth on the matter in dispute had long ago been attained.1 [Note: A. Dillmann, Genesis, ii. 139.]
3. But although not wrong in Abraham's judgment, this sacrifice was wrong in the eye of God; how then can we justify God's command that he should make it? We justify it precisely on that ground which lies patent on the face of the narrative-God meant Abraham to make the sacrifice in spirit, not in the outward act; He meant to write deeply on the Jewish mind the fundamental lesson regarding sacrifice, that it is in the spirit and will that all true sacrifice is made. God intended what actually happened-that Abraham's sacrifice should be complete and that human sacrifice should receive a fatal blow. So far from introducing into Abraham's mind erroneous ideas about sacrifice, this incident finally dispelled from his mind such ideas and permanently fixed in his mind the conviction that the sacrifice God seeks is the devotion of the living soul, not the consumption of a dead body. God met him on the platform of knowledge and of morality to which he had attained, and by requiring him to sacrifice his son taught him and all his descendants in what sense alone such sacrifice can be acceptable. God meant Abraham to sacrifice his son, but not in the coarse material sense. God meant him to yield the lad truly to Him; to arrive at the consciousness that Isaac belonged more truly to God than to him, his father. It was needful that Abraham and Isaac should be in perfect harmony with the Divine will. Only by being really and absolutely in God's hand could they, or can any one, reach the whole and full good designed for them by God.
There are doubtless many difficulties which may be raised on the offering of Isaac: but there are few, if any, which will not vanish away before the simple pathos and lofty spirit of the narrative itself, provided that we take it, as in fairness it must be taken, as a whole; its close not parted from its commencement, nor its commencement from its close-the subordinate parts of the transaction not raised above its essential primary intention. And there is no difficulty which will not be amply compensated by reflecting on the near approach, and yet the complete repulse, of the danger which might have threatened the early Church. Nothing is so remarkable a proof of a Divine and watchful interposition as the deliverance from the infirmity, the exaggeration, the excess, whatever it is, to which the noblest minds and the noblest forms of religion are subject. We have a proverb which tells us that “man's extremity is God's opportunity.” St. Jerome tells us that the corresponding proverb amongst the Jews was “In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen,” or “In the mountain the Lord will provide”-that is, “As He had pity on Abraham, so He will have pity on us.” Abraham reached the very verge of an act which, even if prompted by noble motives and by a Divine call, has by all subsequent revelation and experience been pronounced accursed. At that moment his hand is stayed; and the patriarchal religion is rescued from this conflict with the justice of the Law or the mercy of the Gospel.1 [Note: Dean Stanley, The Jewish Church, i. 43.]
Conversation at the Club turned a good deal upon a recent American book on the Waterloo campaign. Lord Acton mentioned that when the French troops were being mown down by the Austrian fire at the Bridge of Lodi, a private soldier called out: “Why don't you send us across the bridge? We should be killed, but the others would pass over our bodies.” After the battle, enquiries were instituted for the man who made the suggestion, which was acted on; but he had fallen, as he had foreseen. I thought of the speech of the Spanish guerrilero recorded by Castelar: “General, I want to be one of the killed.”2 [Note: Sir M. E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1892-95, i. 214.]
